Tuvalu, an island nation midway between Australia and Hawaii, acknowledges its greatest threat with a festival. Every February and March, when the tides are highest and most of the Polynesian island is submerged in water, the people sing, dance and make crafts to display their culture and history. They show the world what it will lose when climate change takes its first sovereign nation as a victim.... read more

And Rhitu Chatterjee takes us along as she learns how scientists are listening in on aquatic secrets:

Benoît Pirenne walks down a winding rubble path in a fjord on Canada’s Vancouver Island.
He points toward the water, to a sign that reads, “WARNING: CABLE.”

“The cable is going underneath here, and it’s going out 800 kilometers in a big loop in the ocean,” he says.

The cable connects to a network of scientific instruments deep in the Pacific Ocean. The network is calledNEPTUNE Canada. (NEPTUNE stands for North East Pacific Time-Series Underwater Networked Experiments.)

The network was set up by Pirenne and his colleagues at the University of Victoria two years ago. It continuously monitors the ocean environment, recording all sorts of information, including sound... read more